The Palestinian Authority has mobilized its forces, hidden and otherwise, to head off serious fallout from the publication of secret negotiation documents leaked to Qatar's Al Jazeera. The satellite TV station has been broadcasting rigorous coverage and analysis of the leaked documents.

The intensity of the coverage by the widely watched Al Jazeera and claims that the documents show the Palestinian Authority made serious concessions to Israel -- on issues including Jerusalem and refugees --  and had collaborated with Israel to get rid of Palestinian fighters even by killing them have seriously alarmed Palestinian officials as high up as the president.

The Palestinian Authority was caught off-guard by the Al Jazeera revelations but quickly rebounded from the initial shock and went on the offensive, accusing Al Jazeera -- as well as the emir of Qatar -- of plotting to undermine the Palestinian struggle for independence.

For the Arab world, working against the Palestinian struggle is taboo, and targeting the movement's leaders at what is considered a critical time in the fight for independence is also taboo.

The Palestinian public in general is divided over what Al Jazeera has revealed. Although the majority of Palestinians respect the TV station and its coverage of their cause, many say it has exaggerated its coverage of the documents, known as the Palestine Papers.

Discussions back and forth on the social networks show Palestinians divided between supporters of Al Jazeera and supporters of the Palestinian Authority.

“This is not the time to have internal fighting,” said Ahmad Saleem, a university student majoring in business who came to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ headquarters in Ramallah on Tuesday, along with thousands of other people, to show support for Abbas following the Al Jazeera reports.

“Our leadership made mistakes," he said, "but we can see it did not compromise on anything; otherwise, why isn’t there an agreement signed with Israel yet?”

Saleem believes Al Jazeera did not report on the documents in an objective way.

He said he did not see of himself as a strong supporter of Abbas but that Al Jazeera had made it a personal issue with Abbas and Palestinians in general. Therefore, he said, he decided to join the thousands who had come to show support for the Palestinian leader.

-- Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank

Palestinians received a badly needed morale boost on Tuesday from the leader of a superpower, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

At a time when Palestinian morale was very low with the stalemate in the peace process and a feeling of abandonment from the Obama administration, Medvedev came to the rescue.

First, Medvedev made a special visit to the Palestinian territories, coming this time from Jordan, not Israel. Previously, visitors coming to Israel spend two or three days in the county meeting all kinds of officials and visiting all kinds of places. And while they are in Israel, visiting officials usually pay a complimentary and very short visit to the Palestinian areas meeting only with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at his office for two or three hours.

The factors that led to the popular upheaval in Tunisia set off alarm bells throughout the Arab world, and the Palestinian Authority was no different.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad spent more than two hours on Sunday talking to 40 Palestinian journalists at his Ramallah office about the economic situation and living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The message he wanted to send to 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was that economic conditions were good in spite of reports on the rise in consumer prices and relatively high unemployment and poverty figures.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said in a recent report that the consumer price index for 2010 increased by 3.75% compared with the previous year.

The economic situation and the standard of living in the Palestinian areas are a constant concern of the Palestinian Authority, Fayyad said.

As the Israeli bulldozers began to demolish Shepherd Hotel in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Sunday in order to build a new Jewish settlement in its place, Palestinians warned that not only the hotel has fallen, but also the entire peace process and U.S. efforts to revive it.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, strongly reacted to the hotel demolition. Its fall, he said, “has brought down with it all U.S. efforts (to revive the peace process) and ended any possibility to return to negotiations.”

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat added, “East Jerusalem and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in particular have been targeted by Israel in a campaign to forcibly remove Palestinians and supplant them with Jewish settlers. Such actions are unlawful and undermine the two-state solution and the negotiations process.”

Today an orchestra, tomorrow a state.

With these words, Suhail Khoury, director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, introduced the Palestine National Orchestra in its debut Friday in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

More than 40 Palestinian and foreign musicians came together to make the dream of a national orchestra a reality. The task was not easy, particularly because most of the musicians also play with renowned orchestras around the world. But for most of them, putting together a Palestinian national orchestra is seen as a stepping stone toward building an independent state of Palestine.

“Today we are witnessing the birth of the Palestine National Orchestra at a time when the Palestinian struggle for independence is passing through one of its most critical and difficult moments,” Khoury said.

“The task of bringing Palestinian musicians together to add a new cornerstone in the building of an independent Palestinian state was a very difficult endeavor,” he said.

Former Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, once a confidant and close ally of Palestinian President and Fatah chairman Mahmoud Abbas, recently found himself in deep trouble when he apparently had decided to test Abbas’ muscle. In the end, he found himself ostracized and then kicked out of a movement in which it was believed he was the strongest man, after its founder, the late Yasser Arafat.

The Fatah Central Committee on Tuesday suspended Dahlan’s membership in the highest ruling body of the mainstream movement and stripped him of his duties as its spokesman pending the findings of an internal investigating commission.

Dahlan, who has kept away from Abbas and the West Bank after his dismissal from the movement, decided Wednesday to return to the West Bank city of Ramallah from his new home in Cairo to face the  inquiry into allegations that he went too far in bad-mouthing Abbas and of even plotting to overthrow him.

“I will appear in front of the commission and answer all its questions in spite of my reservations from the nature and course of this made-up crisis,” Dahlan, 49, said in statements from Cairo.

In the West Bank city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, thousands of Palestinians and visitors from all over the world gathered at Manger Square on Christmas Eve to watch Jerusalem's Catholic patriarch, Fouad Twal, lead a procession of priests to the Church of the Nativity and to listen to his midnight Mass sermon. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who regularly attends the midnight Mass, was among them.

The procession started at midday from the Catholic church in the Old City of Jerusalem. A convoy of about 50 cars, led by the patriarch, drove the six-mile road south from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. When the convoy arrived at the outskirts of Bethlehem, a metal gate in the 20-foot-high concrete wall that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem opened to let the cars through.

Bethlehem had suffered a great deal in the last 10 years. Its highest moment of glory was the turn of the millennium, when tens of thousands of people gathered there to celebrate that very special time that comes only once every 1,000 years. However, when the peace process that was supposed to emancipate the Palestinian people from the long Israeli occupation broke down, trouble engulfed the entire West Bank, and Bethlehem's share was not lesser that any of its sister cities.

After visiting the site of a Palestinian home that Jerusalem municipal workers demolished on Tuesday, a United Nations official said that such demolitions "have a severe social and economic impact on the lives and welfare of Palestinians.”

Maxwell Gaylard, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, Wednesday called on Israel to cease demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Mousa Subuh put together three shipping containers on his property to make a modest home for his and his son’s families -- a total of 13 people -- in the Ras el-Amoud neighborhood of East Jerusalem after the municipality refused to give him a permit to build a regular home.

He thought that living in shipping containers on his land would not violate building codes in Jerusalem since they are not permanent structures. Subuh must have learned this tactic from Jewish settlers who, when they want to start a new settlement on some West Bank land, put a couple of containers on that land and a couple of families in them to create a de-facto home.

If the government does not remove them, the containers eventually become a full fledged settlement with permanent stone homes. The only difference between Subuh and the Jewish settlers is that Subuh put the shipping container on his land while the settlers put theirs on someone else’s land. But Subuh is not allowed to keep the containers as a home, while no one attempts to remove the settlers.

A Palestinian public opinion poll published Monday in the West Bank city of Ramallah found out that only a quarter of the Palestinians in the West Bank believe they can criticize the Palestinian Authority. In the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the record was even worse as less than a fifth of the Palestinians there believed it is possible to criticize Hamas rule of the coastal enclave.

The poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), said the percentage of Palestinians who believe it is possible to criticize their authority has dropped over the years, from more than half in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2007 to the current figures.

What apparently has prompted this gradual, yet sharp decline is the general feeling of the Palestinian public, whether in the West Bank, ruled by the liberal and Western-backed Palestinian Authority, or in the Gaza Strip, ruled by the fundamentalist and traditional Hamas, of becoming increasingly ruled by a police state.

Israeli police Wednesday expelled Hamas lawmaker and East Jerusalem resident Muhammad Abu Tir to the West Bank city of Ramallah after an Israeli district court upheld a 4-year-old decision by the Israeli minister of interior declaring that Abu Tir's presence in Jerusalem was "illegal."

Palestinians fear the expulsion may set a precedent in which Israel will expel political activists not only from the Islamist Hamas, but from any political faction, including the mainstream Fatah, which has a number of ministers and lawmakers from Jerusalem.

Hatem Abdul Qadder, a former Fatah lawmaker from Jerusalem and former minister in Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's government, expressed concern that Israel may apply the same law to any political activist in the city in an attempt to quell resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday took the opportunity of laying the cornerstone for the new presidential headquarters just north of the West Bank city of Ramallah to tell the world that he was still waiting for U.S. answers regarding an Israeli settlement freeze that would pave the way for resuming direct negotiations.

However, he said, the answer may come as early as Thursday.

“We did not yet receive the official U.S. answers on stopping settlements,” Abbas said. “Maybe we will hear something official tomorrow."

If Israel accepts a freeze, "we are ready" to restart talks, he said. "If not, we will say this option is over and we will search for an alternative.”

On Sept. 1, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad celebrated with the residents of Qarawat Bani Hassan the inauguration of a mile-long road linking the small West Bank village to a spring its residents consider the lifeline of the community. It was called Freedom Road.

While Fayyad was on a trip to Japan this week, hoping to get more funding for his two-year “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State” program, of which building that road was one project, Israel on Wednesday destroyed the road, which is located in Area C of the West Bank.

According to the Oslo breakdown of the West Bank, Area C, which makes up more than 60% of the West Bank land, remains under full Israeli military control. But Area C is also an important segment in Fayyad’s state building program, crucial to his dream of setting up the necessary infrastructure for a viable Palestinian state by August 2011.

Israeli officials had informed Fayyad and the village residents that they would not allow the road because it was located in an area under its full control.